A Place For My Books

Yearly Lists

2023

Top 20 Fiction

Book	Author	Description
Foster	Claire Keegan	It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again.
The Deal of a Lifetime and Other Stories	Fredrik Backman	Two novellas and a short story from Fredrik Backman
Legends & Lattes	Travis Baldree	After a lifetime of bounties and bloodshed, Viv is hanging up her sword for the last time. The battle-weary orc aims to start fresh, opening the first ever coffee shop in the city of Thune. But old and new rivals stand in the way of success — not to mention the fact that no one has the faintest idea what coffee actually is.
Dream Wheels	Richard Wagamese	Moving from the Wild West Shows of the late 1880s to the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas to a lush valley in the mountains, it tells the story of a people’s journey, a family’s vision, a man’s reawakening, a woman’s recovery, and a boy’s emergence to manhood.
The Seed Keeper	Diane Wilson	Weaving together the voices of four indelible women, The Seed Keeper is a beautifully told story of reawakening, of remembering our original relationship to the seeds and, through them, to our ancestors.
Shutter	Ramona Emerson	This blood-chilling debut set in New Mexico’s Navajo Nation is equal parts gripping crime thriller, supernatural horror, and poignant portrayal of coming of age on the reservation.
Scarborough	Catherine Hernandez	Scarborough offers a raw yet empathetic glimpse into a troubled community that locates its dignity in unexpected places: a neighbourhood that refuses to be undone.
Murder on the Red River	Marcie R. Rendon	Introducing Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman whose visions and grit help solve a brutal murder in this award-winning debut.
Crooked Hallelujah	Kelli Jo Ford	It’s 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and fifteen-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny.
Bad Cree	Jessica Johns	Mackenzie, a Cree millennial, wakes up in her one-bedroom Vancouver apartment clutching a pine bough she had been holding in her dream just moments earlier. When she blinks, it disappears. But she can still smell the sharp pine scent in the air, the nearest pine tree a thousand kilometres away in the far reaches of Treaty 8.
A Grandmother Begins the Story	Michelle Porter	Five generations of Métis women argue, dance, struggle, laugh, love, and tell the stories that will sing their family, and perhaps the land itself, into healing in this brilliantly original debut novel.
Chain-Gang All-Stars	Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah	Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.
The Circle	Katherena Vermette	A poignant and unwavering epic told from a constellation of Métis voices that consider the fallout when the person who connects them all goes missing
The Berry Pickers	Amanda Peters	A four-year-old girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that remains unsolved for nearly fifty years
A Quality of Light	Richard Wagamese	Joshua Kane, an Ojibway, has lived since infancy with his white adoptive parents. Johnny Gebhardt is white, and from a young age has had a fascination with Indigenous culture, craving the spirituality and strength he knows are a part of a life sorely lacking in his own.
The Theory of Crows	David A. Robertson	When a troubled father and his estranged teenage daughter head out onto the land in search of the family trapline, they find their way back to themselves, and to each other
The Story of Us	Catherine Hernandez	The Story of Us is a novel about sisterhood, about blood and chosen family, and about how belonging can be found where we least expect it.
Saltus	Tara Gereaux	Tara Gereaux’s novel, set in small-town Saskatchewan, dissects themes of Métis identity, female identity and motherhood, aging and regret, and finally, acceptance.
Moon of the Turning Leaves	Waubgeshig Rice	In the years since a mysterious cataclysm caused a permanent blackout that toppled infrastructure and thrust the world into anarchy, Evan Whitesky has led his community in remote northern Canada off the rez and into the bush, where they’ve been rekindling their Anishinaabe traditions, isolated from the outside world.
Bookshops & Bonedust	Travis Baldree	Viv’s career with the notorious mercenary company Rackam’s Ravens isn’t going as planned.

Top 10 Non-Fiction

Book	Author	Description
Notes on Grief	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie	During the brutal summer of 2020, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s beloved father, a celebrated professor at the University of Nigeria and an irreplaceable figure in a close-knit family, succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. Notes on Grief is Adichie’s tribute to him, and a moving meditation on loss.
I’m Glad My Mom Died	Jennette McCurdy	A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor—including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother—and how she retook control of her life.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands	Kate Beaton	With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed.
I Contain Multitudes	Ed Yong	An examination of the most significant revolution in biology since Darwin—a “microbe’s-eye view” of the world that reveals a marvelous, radically reconceived picture of life on earth.
An Immense World	Ed Yong	A tour of the radically different ways that animals perceive the world
The Power of Story: On Truth, the Trickster, and New Fictions for a New Era	Harold R. Johnson	Approached by an ecumenical society representing many faiths, from Judeo-Christians to fellow members of First Nations, Harold R. Johnson agreed to host a group who wanted to hear him speak about the power of storytelling. This book is the outcome of that gathering.
The Last Doctor	Jean Marmoreo & Johanna Schneller	An urgently important exploration of the human stories behind Canada’s evolving acceptance of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), from one of its first and most thoughtful practitioners.
Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada	Michelle Good	From racism, broken treaties, and cultural pillaging, to the value of Indigenous lives and the importance of Indigenous literature, this collection reveals facts about Indigenous life in Canada that are both devastating and enlightening.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland	Patrick Radden Keefe	A stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.
Boys & Sex	Peggy Orenstein	Peggy Orenstein, author of the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller Girls & Sex, turns her focus to the sexual lives of young men.

Stats

FicNonfic	PageCount	BookCount
Fiction	19,325	65
Nonfiction	9,580	35
Total	28,905	100

All Books

2022

Top 20 Fiction

Book	Author	Description
Blackout	Connie Willis	Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place, with scores of time-traveling historians being sent into the past. But now the time-travel lab is suddenly canceling assignments and switching around everyone’s schedules.
What Strange Paradise	Omar El Akkad	In What Strange Paradise, Eritreans, Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians, Ethiopians, and Lebanese people all share a dream: To escape their lives and find a better place to live, a nicer future for their children, and an existence away from poverty and the chaos of war and political persecution.
All Clear	Connie Willis	Traveling back in time, from Oxford circa 2060 into the thick of World War II, was a routine excursion for three British historians eager to study firsthand the heroism and horrors of the Dunkirk evacuation and the London Blitz. But getting marooned in war-torn 1940 England has turned them from temporal tourists into besieged citizens struggling to survive.
The Strangers	Katherena Vermette	The Strangers brings readers into the dynamic world of the Stranger family, the strength of their bond, the shared pain in their past, and the light that beckons from the horizon. This is a searing exploration of race, class, inherited trauma, and matrilineal bonds that—despite everything—refuse to be broken.
Doomsday Book	Connie Willis	The story is set in two epidemics in two time periods, an influenza epidemic in 2054 and the Black Death in 1348, and the two stories alternate, the future time worrying about Kivrin, the student trapped in the wrong part of the past, while Kivrin back in 1348 is trying to cope and learn and help.
Us Against You	Fredrik Backman	A story of the ways loyalty, friendship, and love carry a small community through its darkest days.
All Systems Red	Martha Wells	All Systems Red follows the (mis)adventures of Murderbot as it tries to protect its humans, when those humans get in trouble after the sudden disappearance of another team on the other side of the planet.
The Overstory	Richard Powers	From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, the novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
A Memory Called Empire	Arkady Martine	The story follows Mahit Dzmare, the ambassador from Lsel Station to the Teixcalaanli Empire, as she investigates the death of her predecessor and the instabilities that underpin that society.
A Desolation Called Peace	Arkady Martine	A few months after A Memory Called Empire, alien forces massacre an industrial colony of the Teixcalaanli Empire. The Teixcalaanli admiral Nine Hibiscus, tasked with confronting the threat, requests an Information Ministry specialist to attempt to communicate with the inscrutable enemy.
Britt-Marie Was Here	Fredrik Backman	The story revolves around 63-year-old Britt-Marie, a woman who finds herself living alone after her husband has a heart attack and cheats on her with another woman. Needing to start a live on her own, she goes to the job centre and doesn’t leave until she has a job.
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy	Becky Chambers	After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a Tea Monk of some renown) and Mosscap (a robot sent on a quest to determine what humanity really needs) turn their attention to the villages and cities of the little moon they call home.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois	Honoree Fanonne Jeffers	Spanning two hundred years, it takes an intimate look at race, feminism, love, and family as told by a line of unforgettable Black women from America’s South. It focuses on a fictional African American family in Georgia, beginning before the state was Georgia.
Sea of Tranquility	Emily St. John Mandel	In this captivating tale of imagination and ambition, a seemingly disparate array of people come into contact with a time traveller who must resist the pull to change the past and the future.
An Unkindness of Ghosts	Rivers Solomon	Rivers Solomon’s novel is set on a giant generation ship, on an interstellar voyage of centuries, divided between the wealthy, light-skinned upper-deckers and the oppressed, laboring lower-deckers.
The Invisible Life of Addie Larue	V.E. Schwab	France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever—and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.
The Winners	Fredrik Backman	Maya Andersson and Benji Ovich, two young people who left in search of a life far from the forest town, come home and joyfully reunite with their closest childhood friends. There is a new sense of optimism and purpose in the town, embodied in the impressive new ice rink that has been built down by the lake.
Ninefox Gambit	Yoon Ha Lee	Ninefox Gambit centers on disgraced captain Kel Cheris, who must recapture the formidable Fortress of Scattered Needles in order to redeem herself in front of the Hexarchate. To win an impossible war Captain Kel Cheris must awaken an ancient weapon and a despised traitor general.
My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologizes	Fredrik Backman	Everyone remembers the smell of their grandmother’s house. Everyone remembers the stories their grandmother told them. But does everyone remember their grandmother flirting with policemen? Driving illegally? Breaking into a zoo in the middle of the night? Firing a paintball gun from a balcony in her dressing gown? Seven-year-old Elsa does. Some might call Elsa’s granny ‘eccentric’, or even ‘crazy’. Elsa calls her a superhero.
Small Things Like These	Claire Keegan	It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Top 10 Non-Fiction

Book	Author	Description
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures	Merlin Sheldrake	When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave.
A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey	Jonathan Meiburg	An enthralling account of a modern voyage of discovery as we meet the clever, social birds of prey called caracaras, which puzzled Darwin, fascinate modern-day falconers, and carry secrets of our planet’s deep past in their family history.
Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey	James Rebanks	The acclaimed chronicle of the regeneration of one family’s traditional English farm
Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life	Lulu Miller	David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him.
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest	Suzanne Simard	Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths—that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.
People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present	Dara Horn	Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones.
Know My Name	Chanel Miller	Chanel Miller’s breathtaking memoir “gives readers the privilege of knowing her not just as Emily Doe, but as Chanel Miller the writer, the artist, the survivor, the fighter.”
Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses	Robin Wall Kimmerer	Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.
Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter	Ben Goldfarb	Eager is the powerful story of how one of the world’s most influential species can help us fight drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction, and climate change — and how we can learn to coexist with our fellow travelers on this planet.
H Is For Hawk	Helen Macdonald	On the surface, H is for Hawk is a falconry book chronicling the training of a Northern Goshawk, and yet it is so much more. It is a brilliantly written memoir of the darkest time in Helen Macdonald’s life, as she struggled to cope with the sudden death of her father, noted photographer Alisdair Macdonald.

Stats

FicNonfic	PageCount	BookCount
Fiction	24,884	69
Nonfiction	12,561	40
Total	37,445	109

All Books

2021

Top 20 Fiction

Book	Author	Description
Pachinko	Min Jin Lee	Pachinko is an epic historical fiction novel following a Korean family who immigrates to Japan. The character-driven story features an ensemble of characters who encounter racism, discrimination, stereotyping, and other aspects of the 20th-century Korean experience of Japan.
Transcendent Kingdom	Yaa Gyasi	A portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief—a novel about faith, science, religion, love.
The Shadow of the Wind	Carlos Ruiz Zafon	The Shadow of the Wind is a coming-of-age tale of a young boy who, through the magic of a single book, finds a purpose greater than himself and a hero in a man he’s never met.
Migrations	Charlotte McConaghy	A novel about a woman who has always been running—from her childhood, her mistakes, her memories—and this time, she’s traveling from Greenland to Antarctica, following the world’s last flock of Arctic terns on their final migration.
The Night Watchman	Louise Erdrich	Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C.
Go, Went, Gone	Jenny Erpenbeck	The tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz.
Greenwood	Michael Christie	The book uses the ringed cross-section of a tree as an organizing principle and structure. As Christie writes, “Wood is time captured. A map. A cellular memory. A record.” And, in some cases, a handy metaphor for a family tree.
The Brothers K	David James Duncan	This novel spans decades in the lives of the Chance family. A father whose dreams of glory on a baseball field are shattered by a mill accident. A mother who clings obsessively to religion as a ward against the darkest hour of her past. Four brothers who come of age during the seismic upheavals of the sixties.
To Be Taught, If Fortunate	Becky Chambers	The story follows four astronauts as they travel beyond the Solar System on a research mission to document extraterrestrial life on four planets. The explorers are put into suspended animation for extended periods of time while they travel between the planets.
Five Little Indians	Michelle Good	The book follows the lives of five young adults as they grapple with life after ‘Indian School’ in the 1960s. From their prison-like residential school on Vancouver Island, they are turfed onto the streets of Vancouver with no support, money, family connections or life skills.
Ragged Company	Richard Wagamese	Four chronically homeless people–Amelia One Sky, Timber, Double Dick and Digger–seek refuge in a warm movie theatre when a severe Arctic Front descends on the city. During what is supposed to be a one-time event, this temporary refuge transfixes them.
Ancillary Justice	Ann Leckie	The story of Breq, the sole surviving “segment” of the artificial intelligence that once animated an interstellar troop ship, Justice of Toren, and its ancillary soldiers. Breq, the first-person narrator and protagonist, embarks on a quest for vengeance.
Keeper’n Me	Richard Wagamese	The story of Garnet Raven. As a small child he was taken from his home on an Ojibway reserve and placed in a series of foster homes during the Sixties Scoop. Garnet eventually finds his way back home to the Whitedog Reserve in northwestern Ontario where he hails from, but it isn’t an easy journey.
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within	Becky Chambers	The Five-Hop is run by an enterprising alien and her sometimes helpful child, who work hard to provide a little piece of home to everyone passing through. When a freak technological failure halts all traffic to and from Gora, three strangers—all different species with different aims—are thrown together at the Five-Hop.
A Psalm for the Wild Built	Becky Chambers	It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools and wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again, fading into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in.
Anxious People	Fredrik Backman	A poignant comedy about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined.
The Back of the Turtle	Thomas King	When Gabriel Quinn, a brilliant scientist, abandons his laboratory and returns to Smoke River Reserve, where his mother and sister lived, he finds that almost everyone in the community has disappeared. Even the sea turtles are gone, poisoned by an environmental disaster known as The Ruin.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine	Gail Honeyman	The story of a quirky yet lonely woman whose social misunderstandings and deeply ingrained routines could be changed forever–if she can bear to confront the secrets she has avoided all her life.
A Man Called Ove	Fredrik Backman	Ove, an ill-tempered, isolated retiree who spends his days enforcing block association rules and visiting his wife’s grave, has finally given up on life just as an unlikely friendship develops with his boisterous new neighbors.
Beartown	Fredrik Backman	Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.

Top 10 Non-Fiction

Book	Author	Description
The Truth About Stories	Thomas King	“Stories are wondrous things,” award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. “And they are dangerous.”
Voices from Chernobyl	Svetlana Alexievich	On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy.
Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine	James Maskalyk	Maskalyk witnesses the story of “human aliveness”–our mourning and laughter, tragedies and hopes, the frailty of being and the resilience of the human spirit. And it’s here too that he is swept into the story, confronting his fears and doubts and questioning what it is to be a doctor.
Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers	Andy Greenberg	The true story of the most devastating act of cyberwarfare in history and the desperate hunt to identify and track the elite Russian agents behind it.
Love Lives Here: A Story of Thriving in a Transgender Family	Amanda Jette Knox	An inspirational story of accepting and embracing two trans people in a family–a family who shows what’s possible when you “lead with love.”
Underland: A Deep Time Journey	Robert Macfarlane	A journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland’s glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves.
The Rise of Wolf 8	Rick McIntyre	Yellowstone National Park was once home to an abundance of wild wolves—but park rangers killed the last of their kind in the 1920s. Decades later, the rangers brought them back, with the first wolves arriving from Canada in 1995. This is the incredible true story of one of those wolves.
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China	Jung Chang	A family history that spans a century, recounting the lives of three female generations in China, by Chinese writer Jung Chang. First published in 1991, Wild Swans contains the biographies of her grandmother and her mother, then finally her own autobiography.
Educated	Tara Westover	Tara Westover was seventeen when she first set foot in a classroom. Instead of traditional lessons, she grew up learning how to stew herbs into medicine, scavenging in the family scrap yard and helping her family prepare for the apocalypse. She had no birth certificate and no medical records and had never been enrolled in school.
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty	Patrick Radden Keefe	The book examines the history of the Sackler family, including the founding of Purdue Pharma, their role in the marketing of pharmaceuticals, and the family’s central role in the opioid epidemic.

Stats

FicNonfic	PageCount	BookCount
Fiction	20,549	55
Nonfiction	11,451	36
Total	32,000	91

All Books

2020

Top 20 Fiction

Book	Author	Description
Cryptonomicon	Neal Stephenson	In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, a young United States Navy code breaker and mathematical genius, is assigned to the newly formed joint British and American Detachment 2702. This ultra-secret unit’s role is to hide the fact that Allied intelligence has cracked the German Enigma code.
Starlight	Richard Wagamese	Richard Wagamese’s final novel is a rapturous and profoundly moving story of love, compassion, mercy, and the consolations to be found in the natural world.
A Gentleman in Moscow	Amor Towles	A novel about Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, a Russian aristocrat who is condemned by Communists to spend the rest of his life confined in the Metropol, the capital’s most glamorous hotel.
Medicine Walk	Richard Wagamese	The journey of 16-year-old Franklin Starlight and his dying, alcoholic father Eldon Starlight to find a burial site for Eldon at a place deep in the forest he remembers fondly from his youth.
Hyperion	Dan Simmons	Seven pilgrims from different worlds are chosen for a mission to Hyperion. They must locate the Time Tombs. These structures continually move back in time and they are guarded by a dangerous figure called the Shrike. They must destroy the Shrike or manipulate the Time Tombs to preserve humanity.
The Fall of Hyperion	Dan Simmons	On the world of Hyperion, the mysterious Time Tombs are opening. And the secrets they contain mean that nothing—nothing anywhere in the universe—will ever be the same.
Indian Horse	Richard Wagamese	Set in Northern Ontario in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it follows protagonist Saul Indian Horse as he uses his extraordinary talent for ice hockey to try and escape his traumatic residential school experience.
The Nickel Boys	Colson Whitehead	Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children.
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet	Becky Chambers	Fleeing her old life, Rosemary Harper joins the multi-species crew of the Wayfarer as a file clerk, and follows them on their various missions throughout the galaxy.
The Fifth Season	N.K. Jemisin	The story follows the journey of Essun, mother and “orogene,” an oppressed, racially defined class of powerful earth-benders in Jemisin’s fictitious, supercontinental world, The Stillness.
Station Eleven	Emily St. John Mandel	Set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
Medicine River	Thomas King	Medicine River chronicles the lives of a group of contemporary First Nations in Western Canada. The novel is divided into eighteen short chapters. The story is recounted by the protagonist, Will, in an amiable, conversational fashion, with frequent flashbacks to earlier portions of his life.
The Obelisk Gate	N.K. Jemisin	The book continues forward from an especially bad Fifth Season, one that may become an apocalypse. It follows two main characters: a mother and daughter, both of whom are magically talented (“orogenes”), who were separated just before the most recent Fifth Season.
Green Grass, Running Water	Thomas King	An exploration of a group of characters living in the small Canadian town of Blossom. It explores the Native American struggle to come to terms with their identity in the twentieth century; each of the Native American characters in the novel is striving to find a balance between tradition and modernity.
Piranesi	Susanna Clarke	A book about a man, Piranesi, living in a grand labyrinth that is filled with statues, beset by floods and surrounded by celestial objects. Piranesi carefully documents the world around him, including the house’s many halls, the tides and the human remains that he finds.
The Stone Sky	N.K. Jemisin	The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women.
Leviathan Wakes	James S.A. Corey	Two hundred years after migrating into space, mankind is in turmoil. When a reluctant ship’s captain and washed-up detective find themselves involved in the case of a missing girl, what they discover brings our solar system to the brink of civil war, and exposes the greatest conspiracy in human history.
A Closed and Common Orbit	Becky Chambers	Pepper takes Lovelace, the AI now housed illegally in an artificial body, back to her planet and helps her as she struggles to find her own identity and way of interacting with the world.
Record of a Spaceborn Few	Becky Chambers	A teenaged boy rages against the limits of a world structed around family. A mother watches her children’s fears of space paralyze them. In the midst of these, an orphaned young man arrives in the Fleet, desperate for a home and security that he has never had. Accidents happen, but violence lurks, too.
The Glass Hotel	Emily St. John Mandel	The book follows the aftermath of a disturbing graffiti incident at a hotel on Vancouver Island and the collapse of an international Ponzi scheme.

Top 10 Non-Fiction

Book	Author	Description
The Body: A Guide for Occupants	Bill Bryson	The Body helps you become smarter about how to take care of and use this mechanism that lets you have life by explaining how it’s put together, what happens on the inside, and how it works
One Native Life	Richard Wagamese	One Native Life is a look back down the road Richard Wagamese has traveled - from childhood abuse to adult alcoholism - in reclaiming his identity. It’s about what he has learned as a human being, a man, and an Ojibway in his 52 years on Earth.
When Breath Becomes Air	Paul Kalanithi	The memoir of Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon at Stanford University, who is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in his mid-thirties. Kalanithi uses the pages in this book to not only tell his story, but also share his ideas on how to approach death with grace and what it means to be fully alive.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End	Atul Gawande	A meditation on how people can better live with age-related frailty, serious illness, and approaching death. Gawande calls for a change in the way that medical professionals treat patients approaching their ends.
The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America	Thomas King	Neither a traditional nor all-encompassing history of First Nations people in North America, The Inconvenient Indian is a personal meditation on what it means to be “Indian.”
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration	Isabel Wilkerson	The story of how and why millions of Black Americans left the South between 1915 and 1970 to escape the brutality of the Jim Crow Laws and find safety, better pay, and more freedom in what is known today as The Great Migration.
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption	Bryan Stevenson	A memoir by American attorney Bryan Stevenson that documents his career defending disadvantaged clients.
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men	Caroline Criado Perez	The book describes the adverse effects on women caused by gender bias in big data collection.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants	Robin Wall Kimmerer	A book about the role of Indigenous knowledge as an alternative or complementary approach to Western mainstream scientific methodologies.
The Skin We’re In	Desmond Cole	Chronicling just one year in the struggle against racism in this country, The Skin We’re In reveals in stark detail the injustices faced by Black Canadians on a daily basis

Stats

FicNonfic	PageCount	BookCount
Fiction	26,095	65
Nonfiction	16,613	52
Total	42,708	117

All Books

Longer Lists

Best Books (Unranked)

Top 100 Fiction

Book	Author	Description
Roots	Alex Haley	The story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent, sold into slavery in Africa, and transported to North America; it follows his life and the lives of his descendants in the United States down to Haley.
The Berry Pickers	Amanda Peters	A four-year-old girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that remains unsolved for nearly fifty years
A Gentleman in Moscow	Amor Towles	A novel about Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, a Russian aristocrat who is condemned by Communists to spend the rest of his life confined in the Metropol, the capital’s most glamorous hotel.
Cloud Cuckoo Land	Anthony Doerr	Cloud Cuckoo Land follows five characters whose stories, despite spanning nearly six centuries, are bound together by their mutual love for a single book.
Daughters of Smoke and Fire	Ava Homa	The unforgettable, haunting story of a young woman’s perilous fight for freedom and justice for her brother, in the first novel published in English by a female Kurdish writer
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet	Becky Chambers	Fleeing her old life, Rosemary Harper joins the multi-species crew of the Wayfarer as a file clerk, and follows them on their various missions throughout the galaxy.
A Closed and Common Orbit	Becky Chambers	Pepper takes Lovelace, the AI now housed illegally in an artificial body, back to her planet and helps her as she struggles to find her own identity and way of interacting with the world.
Record of a Spaceborn Few	Becky Chambers	A teenaged boy rages against the limits of a world structed around family. A mother watches her children’s fears of space paralyze them. In the midst of these, an orphaned young man arrives in the Fleet, desperate for a home and security that he has never had. Accidents happen, but violence lurks, too.
To Be Taught, If Fortunate	Becky Chambers	The story follows four astronauts as they travel beyond the Solar System on a research mission to document extraterrestrial life on four planets. The explorers are put into suspended animation for extended periods of time while they travel between the planets.
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within	Becky Chambers	The Five-Hop is run by an enterprising alien and her sometimes helpful child, who work hard to provide a little piece of home to everyone passing through. When a freak technological failure halts all traffic to and from Gora, three strangers—all different species with different aims—are thrown together at the Five-Hop.
A Psalm for the Wild Built	Becky Chambers	It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools and wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again, fading into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in.
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy	Becky Chambers	After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a Tea Monk of some renown) and Mosscap (a robot sent on a quest to determine what humanity really needs) turn their attention to the villages and cities of the little moon they call home.
The Vanishing Half	Brit Bennett	A stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.
Sweetness in the Belly	Camilla Gibb	Set in Emperor Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia and the racially charged world of Thatcher’s London, Sweetness in the Belly is a richly detailed portrayal of one woman’s search for love and belonging.
The Shadow of the Wind	Carlos Ruiz Zafon	The Shadow of the Wind is a coming-of-age tale of a young boy who, through the magic of a single book, finds a purpose greater than himself and a hero in a man he’s never met.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter	Carson McCullers	In a Georgia Mill town during the 1930s, an enigmatic John Singer, draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a doctor, a widowed café owner, and a young girl.
Scarborough	Catherine Hernandez	Scarborough offers a raw yet empathetic glimpse into a troubled community that locates its dignity in unexpected places: a neighbourhood that refuses to be undone.
The Story of Us	Catherine Hernandez	The Story of Us is a novel about sisterhood, about blood and chosen family, and about how belonging can be found where we least expect it.
Migrations	Charlotte McConaghy	A novel about a woman who has always been running—from her childhood, her mistakes, her memories—and this time, she’s traveling from Greenland to Antarctica, following the world’s last flock of Arctic terns on their final migration.
Purple Hibiscus	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie	Fifteen-year-old Kambili’s world is circumscribed by the high walls and frangipani trees of her family compound. Her wealthy Catholic father, under whose shadow Kambili lives, while generous and politically active in the community, is repressive and fanatically religious at home.
Half of a Yellow Sun	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie	Set during a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s.
Foster	Claire Keegan	It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again.
Small Things Like These	Claire Keegan	It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
The Nickel Boys	Colson Whitehead	Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children.
Flowers for Algernon	Daniel Keyes	The story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius…and introduces him to heartache.
The Theory of Crows	David A. Robertson	When a troubled father and his estranged teenage daughter head out onto the land in search of the family trapline, they find their way back to themselves, and to each other
Brother	David Chariandy	David Chariandy’s Brother is his intensely beautiful, searingly powerful, and tightly constructed second novel, exploring questions of masculinity, family, race, and identity as they are played out in a Scarborough housing complex during the sweltering heat and simmering violence of the summer of 1991.
The Brothers K	David James Duncan	This novel spans decades in the lives of the Chance family. A father whose dreams of glory on a baseball field are shattered by a mill accident. A mother who clings obsessively to religion as a ward against the darkest hour of her past. Four brothers who come of age during the seismic upheavals of the sixties.
The Seed Keeper	Diane Wilson	Weaving together the voices of four indelible women, The Seed Keeper is a beautifully told story of reawakening, of remembering our original relationship to the seeds and, through them, to our ancestors.
The Goldfinch	Donna Tartt	A young New Yorker grieving his mother’s death is pulled into a gritty underworld of art and wealth.
Shuggie Bain	Douglas Stuart	Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher’s policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city’s notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings.
Station Eleven	Emily St. John Mandel	Set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
The Glass Hotel	Emily St. John Mandel	The book follows the aftermath of a disturbing graffiti incident at a hotel on Vancouver Island and the collapse of an international Ponzi scheme.
Sea of Tranquility	Emily St. John Mandel	In this captivating tale of imagination and ambition, a seemingly disparate array of people come into contact with a time traveller who must resist the pull to change the past and the future.
A Man Called Ove	Fredrik Backman	Ove, an ill-tempered, isolated retiree who spends his days enforcing block association rules and visiting his wife’s grave, has finally given up on life just as an unlikely friendship develops with his boisterous new neighbors.
My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologizes	Fredrik Backman	Everyone remembers the smell of their grandmother’s house. Everyone remembers the stories their grandmother told them. But does everyone remember their grandmother flirting with policemen? Driving illegally? Breaking into a zoo in the middle of the night? Firing a paintball gun from a balcony in her dressing gown? Seven-year-old Elsa does. Some might call Elsa’s granny ‘eccentric’, or even ‘crazy’. Elsa calls her a superhero.
Britt-Marie Was Here	Fredrik Backman	The story revolves around 63-year-old Britt-Marie, a woman who finds herself living alone after her husband has a heart attack and cheats on her with another woman. Needing to start a live on her own, she goes to the job centre and doesn’t leave until she has a job.
Beartown	Fredrik Backman	Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.
Us Against You	Fredrik Backman	A story of the ways loyalty, friendship, and love carry a small community through its darkest days.
Anxious People	Fredrik Backman	A poignant comedy about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined.
The Deal of a Lifetime and Other Stories	Fredrik Backman	Two novellas and a short story from Fredrik Backman
The Winners	Fredrik Backman	Maya Andersson and Benji Ovich, two young people who left in search of a life far from the forest town, come home and joyfully reunite with their closest childhood friends. There is a new sense of optimism and purpose in the town, embodied in the impressive new ice rink that has been built down by the lake.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine	Gail Honeyman	The story of a quirky yet lonely woman whose social misunderstandings and deeply ingrained routines could be changed forever–if she can bear to confront the secrets she has avoided all her life.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois	Honoree Fanonne Jeffers	Spanning two hundred years, it takes an intimate look at race, feminism, love, and family as told by a line of unforgettable Black women from America’s South. It focuses on a fictional African American family in Georgia, beginning before the state was Georgia.
Shades of Grey	Jasper Fforde	For Eddie, life looks colorful. Life looks good. But everything changes when he moves with his father, a respected swatchman, to East Carmine. There, he falls in love with a Grey named Jane who opens his eyes to the painful truth behind his seemingly perfect, rigidly controlled society.
Go, Went, Gone	Jenny Erpenbeck	The tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz.
Bad Cree	Jessica Johns	Mackenzie, a Cree millennial, wakes up in her one-bedroom Vancouver apartment clutching a pine bough she had been holding in her dream just moments earlier. When she blinks, it disappears. But she can still smell the sharp pine scent in the air, the nearest pine tree a thousand kilometres away in the far reaches of Treaty 8.
Of Mice and Men	John Steinbeck	They are an unlikely pair: George is “small and quick and dark of face”; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a “family,” clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation.
East of Eden	John Steinbeck	Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
Disappearing Earth	Julia Phillips	One August afternoon, two sisters—Sophia, eight, and Alyona, eleven—go missing from a beach on the far-flung Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Russia. Taking us through the year that follows, Disappearing Earth enters the lives of women and girls in this tightly knit community who are connected by the crime.
Woman of Light	Kali Fajardo-Anstine	An epic of betrayal, love, and fate that spans five generations of an Indigenous Chicano family in the American West
The Strangers	Katherena Vermette	The Strangers brings readers into the dynamic world of the Stranger family, the strength of their bond, the shared pain in their past, and the light that beckons from the horizon. This is a searing exploration of race, class, inherited trauma, and matrilineal bonds that—despite everything—refuse to be broken.
The Circle	Katherena Vermette	A poignant and unwavering epic told from a constellation of Métis voices that consider the fallout when the person who connects them all goes missing
Never Let Me Go	Kazuo Ishiguro	As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.
Klara and the Sun	Kazuo Ishiguro	Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside.
Crooked Hallelujah	Kelli Jo Ford	It’s 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and fifteen-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny.
Lonesome Dove	Larry McMurtry	Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers.
The Night Watchman	Louise Erdrich	Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C.
The Shadow King	Maaza Mengiste	Ethiopia, 1935. With the threat of Mussolini’s army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid. Her new employer, Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie’s army, rushes to mobilise his strongest men before the Italians invade.
Murder on the Red River	Marcie R. Rendon	Introducing Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman whose visions and grit help solve a brutal murder in this award-winning debut.
Greenwood	Michael Christie	The book uses the ringed cross-section of a tree as an organizing principle and structure. As Christie writes, “Wood is time captured. A map. A cellular memory. A record.” And, in some cases, a handy metaphor for a family tree.
Five Little Indians	Michelle Good	The book follows the lives of five young adults as they grapple with life after ‘Indian School’ in the 1960s. From their prison-like residential school on Vancouver Island, they are turfed onto the streets of Vancouver with no support, money, family connections or life skills.
A Grandmother Begins the Story	Michelle Porter	Five generations of Métis women argue, dance, struggle, laugh, love, and tell the stories that will sing their family, and perhaps the land itself, into healing in this brilliantly original debut novel.
Pachinko	Min Jin Lee	Pachinko is an epic historical fiction novel following a Korean family who immigrates to Japan. The character-driven story features an ensemble of characters who encounter racism, discrimination, stereotyping, and other aspects of the 20th-century Korean experience of Japan.
Chain-Gang All-Stars	Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah	Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.
Cryptonomicon	Neal Stephenson	In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, a young United States Navy code breaker and mathematical genius, is assigned to the newly formed joint British and American Detachment 2702. This ultra-secret unit’s role is to hide the fact that Allied intelligence has cracked the German Enigma code.
The Graveyard Book	Neil Gaiman	Nobody Owens, known as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn’t live in a graveyard, being raised by ghosts, with a guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the dead.
The Mountains Sing	Nguyen Phan Que Mai	A multigenerational tale of the Tr<U+1EA7>n family, set against the backdrop of the Vi<U+1EC7>t Nam War.
Kindred	Octavia E. Butler	The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.
Parable of the Sower	Octavia E. Butler	When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day.
Parable of the Talents	Octavia E. Butler	In 2032, Lauren Olamina has survived the destruction of her home and family, and realized her vision of a peaceful community in northern California based on her newly founded faith, Earthseed.
What Strange Paradise	Omar El Akkad	In What Strange Paradise, Eritreans, Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians, Ethiopians, and Lebanese people all share a dream: To escape their lives and find a better place to live, a nicer future for their children, and an existence away from poverty and the chaos of war and political persecution.
A Master of Djinn	P. Djeli Clark	Al-Jahiz transformed the world 50 years ago when he opened up the veil between the magical and mundane realms, before vanishing into the unknown. This murderer claims to be al-Jahiz, returned to condemn the modern age for its social oppressions.
Babel: An Arcane History	R.F. Kuang	A thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire.
Shutter	Ramona Emerson	This blood-chilling debut set in New Mexico’s Navajo Nation is equal parts gripping crime thriller, supernatural horror, and poignant portrayal of coming of age on the reservation.
The Overstory	Richard Powers	From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, the novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
Empire Falls	Richard Russo	Welcome to Empire Falls, a blue-collar town full of abandoned mills whose citizens surround themselves with the comforts and feuds provided by lifelong friends and neighbors and who find humor and hope in the most unlikely places.
Keeper’n Me	Richard Wagamese	The story of Garnet Raven. As a small child he was taken from his home on an Ojibway reserve and placed in a series of foster homes during the Sixties Scoop. Garnet eventually finds his way back home to the Whitedog Reserve in northwestern Ontario where he hails from, but it isn’t an easy journey.
A Quality of Light	Richard Wagamese	Joshua Kane, an Ojibway, has lived since infancy with his white adoptive parents. Johnny Gebhardt is white, and from a young age has had a fascination with Indigenous culture, craving the spirituality and strength he knows are a part of a life sorely lacking in his own.
Dream Wheels	Richard Wagamese	Moving from the Wild West Shows of the late 1880s to the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas to a lush valley in the mountains, it tells the story of a people’s journey, a family’s vision, a man’s reawakening, a woman’s recovery, and a boy’s emergence to manhood.
Ragged Company	Richard Wagamese	Four chronically homeless people–Amelia One Sky, Timber, Double Dick and Digger–seek refuge in a warm movie theatre when a severe Arctic Front descends on the city. During what is supposed to be a one-time event, this temporary refuge transfixes them.
Indian Horse	Richard Wagamese	Set in Northern Ontario in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it follows protagonist Saul Indian Horse as he uses his extraordinary talent for ice hockey to try and escape his traumatic residential school experience.
Medicine Walk	Richard Wagamese	The journey of 16-year-old Franklin Starlight and his dying, alcoholic father Eldon Starlight to find a burial site for Eldon at a place deep in the forest he remembers fondly from his youth.
Starlight	Richard Wagamese	Richard Wagamese’s final novel is a rapturous and profoundly moving story of love, compassion, mercy, and the consolations to be found in the natural world.
An Unkindness of Ghosts	Rivers Solomon	Rivers Solomon’s novel is set on a giant generation ship, on an interstellar voyage of centuries, divided between the wealthy, light-skinned upper-deckers and the oppressed, laboring lower-deckers.
The Vanished Birds	Simon Jimenez	A mysterious child lands in the care of a solitary woman, changing both of their lives forever.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell	Susanna Clarke	In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars in 1806, most people believe magic to have long since disappeared from England - until the reclusive Mr. Norrell reveals his powers and becomes an overnight celebrity.
Piranesi	Susanna Clarke	A book about a man, Piranesi, living in a grand labyrinth that is filled with statues, beset by floods and surrounded by celestial objects. Piranesi carefully documents the world around him, including the house’s many halls, the tides and the human remains that he finds.
Saltus	Tara Gereaux	Tara Gereaux’s novel, set in small-town Saskatchewan, dissects themes of Métis identity, female identity and motherhood, aging and regret, and finally, acceptance.
Medicine River	Thomas King	Medicine River chronicles the lives of a group of contemporary First Nations in Western Canada. The novel is divided into eighteen short chapters. The story is recounted by the protagonist, Will, in an amiable, conversational fashion, with frequent flashbacks to earlier portions of his life.
Green Grass, Running Water	Thomas King	An exploration of a group of characters living in the small Canadian town of Blossom. It explores the Native American struggle to come to terms with their identity in the twentieth century; each of the Native American characters in the novel is striving to find a balance between tradition and modernity.
The Back of the Turtle	Thomas King	When Gabriel Quinn, a brilliant scientist, abandons his laboratory and returns to Smoke River Reserve, where his mother and sister lived, he finds that almost everyone in the community has disappeared. Even the sea turtles are gone, poisoned by an environmental disaster known as The Ruin.
There There	Tommy Orange	Here is a story of several people, each of whom has private reasons for travelling to the Big Oakland Powwow.
Legends & Lattes	Travis Baldree	After a lifetime of bounties and bloodshed, Viv is hanging up her sword for the last time. The battle-weary orc aims to start fresh, opening the first ever coffee shop in the city of Thune. But old and new rivals stand in the way of success — not to mention the fact that no one has the faintest idea what coffee actually is.
Bookshops & Bonedust	Travis Baldree	Viv’s career with the notorious mercenary company Rackam’s Ravens isn’t going as planned.
The Invisible Life of Addie Larue	V.E. Schwab	France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever—and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.
Moon of the Crusted Snow	Waubgeshig Rice	With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow.
Moon of the Turning Leaves	Waubgeshig Rice	In the years since a mysterious cataclysm caused a permanent blackout that toppled infrastructure and thrust the world into anarchy, Evan Whitesky has led his community in remote northern Canada off the rez and into the bush, where they’ve been rekindling their Anishinaabe traditions, isolated from the outside world.
Homegoing	Yaa Gyasi	A story of exceptional scope and sweeping vision that traces the descendants of two sisters across three hundred years in Ghana and America.
Transcendent Kingdom	Yaa Gyasi	A portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief—a novel about faith, science, religion, love.

Top 50 Non-Fiction

Book	Author	Description
Midnight in Chernobyl	Adam Higginbotham	A powerful investigation into Chernobyl and how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the history’s worst nuclear disasters.
Love Lives Here: A Story of Thriving in a Transgender Family	Amanda Jette Knox	An inspirational story of accepting and embracing two trans people in a family–a family who shows what’s possible when you “lead with love.”
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End	Atul Gawande	A meditation on how people can better live with age-related frailty, serious illness, and approaching death. Gawande calls for a change in the way that medical professionals treat patients approaching their ends.
Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter	Ben Goldfarb	Eager is the powerful story of how one of the world’s most influential species can help us fight drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction, and climate change — and how we can learn to coexist with our fellow travelers on this planet.
A Short History of Nearly Everything	Bill Bryson	Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us.
The Body: A Guide for Occupants	Bill Bryson	The Body helps you become smarter about how to take care of and use this mechanism that lets you have life by explaining how it’s put together, what happens on the inside, and how it works
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption	Bryan Stevenson	A memoir by American attorney Bryan Stevenson that documents his career defending disadvantaged clients.
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men	Caroline Criado Perez	The book describes the adverse effects on women caused by gender bias in big data collection.
Know My Name	Chanel Miller	Chanel Miller’s breathtaking memoir “gives readers the privilege of knowing her not just as Emily Doe, but as Chanel Miller the writer, the artist, the survivor, the fighter.”
The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer	Charles Graeber	Follow along as this New York Times bestselling author details the astonishing scientific discovery of the code to unleashing the human immune system to fight.
People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present	Dara Horn	Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones.
Killers of the Flower Moon	David Grann	A twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history.
The Skin We’re In	Desmond Cole	Chronicling just one year in the struggle against racism in this country, The Skin We’re In reveals in stark detail the injustices faced by Black Canadians on a daily basis
I Contain Multitudes	Ed Yong	An examination of the most significant revolution in biology since Darwin—a “microbe’s-eye view” of the world that reveals a marvelous, radically reconceived picture of life on earth.
An Immense World	Ed Yong	A tour of the radically different ways that animals perceive the world
The Power of Story: On Truth, the Trickster, and New Fictions for a New Era	Harold R. Johnson	Approached by an ecumenical society representing many faiths, from Judeo-Christians to fellow members of First Nations, Harold R. Johnson agreed to host a group who wanted to hear him speak about the power of storytelling. This book is the outcome of that gathering.
H Is For Hawk	Helen Macdonald	On the surface, H is for Hawk is a falconry book chronicling the training of a Northern Goshawk, and yet it is so much more. It is a brilliantly written memoir of the darkest time in Helen Macdonald’s life, as she struggled to cope with the sudden death of her father, noted photographer Alisdair Macdonald.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration	Isabel Wilkerson	The story of how and why millions of Black Americans left the South between 1915 and 1970 to escape the brutality of the Jim Crow Laws and find safety, better pay, and more freedom in what is known today as The Great Migration.
Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine	James Maskalyk	Maskalyk witnesses the story of “human aliveness”–our mourning and laughter, tragedies and hopes, the frailty of being and the resilience of the human spirit. And it’s here too that he is swept into the story, confronting his fears and doubts and questioning what it is to be a doctor.
Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey	James Rebanks	The acclaimed chronicle of the regeneration of one family’s traditional English farm
Dark Money	Jane Mayer	Who are the immensely wealthy right-wing ideologues shaping the fate of America today?
The Last Doctor	Jean Marmoreo & Johanna Schneller	An urgently important exploration of the human stories behind Canada’s evolving acceptance of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), from one of its first and most thoughtful practitioners.
The North-West is Our Mother	Jean Teillet	There is a missing chapter in the narrative of Canada’s Indigenous peoples—the story of the Métis Nation, a new Indigenous people descended from both First Nations and Europeans
The Soul of Baseball	Joe Posnanski	A fascinating account of a man who outlasted the ignorance of a nation and persevered to become a beloved figure.
A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey	Jonathan Meiburg	An enthralling account of a modern voyage of discovery as we meet the clever, social birds of prey called caracaras, which puzzled Darwin, fascinate modern-day falconers, and carry secrets of our planet’s deep past in their family history.
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China	Jung Chang	A family history that spans a century, recounting the lives of three female generations in China, by Chinese writer Jung Chang. First published in 1991, Wild Swans contains the biographies of her grandmother and her mother, then finally her own autobiography.
Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life	Lulu Miller	David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him.
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures	Merlin Sheldrake	When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave.
The New Jim Crow	Michelle Alexander	This book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada	Michelle Good	From racism, broken treaties, and cultural pillaging, to the value of Indigenous lives and the importance of Indigenous literature, this collection reveals facts about Indigenous life in Canada that are both devastating and enlightening.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland	Patrick Radden Keefe	A stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty	Patrick Radden Keefe	The book examines the history of the Sackler family, including the founding of Purdue Pharma, their role in the marketing of pharmaceuticals, and the family’s central role in the opioid epidemic.
Drawdown	Paul Hawken	The 100 most substantive solutions to reverse global warming, based on meticulous research by leading scientists and policymakers around the world
When Breath Becomes Air	Paul Kalanithi	The memoir of Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon at Stanford University, who is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in his mid-thirties. Kalanithi uses the pages in this book to not only tell his story, but also share his ideas on how to approach death with grace and what it means to be fully alive.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks	Rebecca Skloot	Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine.
One Native Life	Richard Wagamese	One Native Life is a look back down the road Richard Wagamese has traveled - from childhood abuse to adult alcoholism - in reclaiming his identity. It’s about what he has learned as a human being, a man, and an Ojibway in his 52 years on Earth.
The Rise of Wolf 8	Rick McIntyre	Yellowstone National Park was once home to an abundance of wild wolves—but park rangers killed the last of their kind in the 1920s. Decades later, the rangers brought them back, with the first wolves arriving from Canada in 1995. This is the incredible true story of one of those wolves.
Underland: A Deep Time Journey	Robert Macfarlane	A journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland’s glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves.
Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses	Robin Wall Kimmerer	Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants	Robin Wall Kimmerer	A book about the role of Indigenous knowledge as an alternative or complementary approach to Western mainstream scientific methodologies.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer	Siddhartha Mukherjee	Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion.
The Gene: An Intimate History	Siddhartha Mukherjee	A fascinating history of the gene and a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingeniously picked apart what makes us tick
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human	Siddhartha Mukherjee	In The Song of the Cell, Mukherjee tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans.
The Code Book	Singh, Simon	The first sweeping history of encryption, tracing its evolution and revealing the dramatic effects codes have had on wars, nations, and individual lives.
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest	Suzanne Simard	Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths—that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.
Voices from Chernobyl	Svetlana Alexievich	On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy.
Seven Fallen Feathers	Tanya Talaga	Over the span of eleven years, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. They were hundreds of kilometres away from their families, forced to leave home because there was no adequate high school on their reserves.
Educated	Tara Westover	Tara Westover was seventeen when she first set foot in a classroom. Instead of traditional lessons, she grew up learning how to stew herbs into medicine, scavenging in the family scrap yard and helping her family prepare for the apocalypse. She had no birth certificate and no medical records and had never been enrolled in school.
The Truth About Stories	Thomas King	“Stories are wondrous things,” award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. “And they are dangerous.”
The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America	Thomas King	Neither a traditional nor all-encompassing history of First Nations people in North America, The Inconvenient Indian is a personal meditation on what it means to be “Indian.”

SFF Series

Book	Author	Description
Ancillary Justice	Ann Leckie	The story of Breq, the sole surviving “segment” of the artificial intelligence that once animated an interstellar troop ship, Justice of Toren, and its ancillary soldiers. Breq, the first-person narrator and protagonist, embarks on a quest for vengeance.
Ancillary Sword	Ann Leckie	Once a weapon of conquest controlling thousands of minds, now she has only a single body and serves the emperor. With a new ship and a troublesome crew, Breq is ordered to go to the only place in the galaxy she would agree to go: to Athoek Station to protect the family of a lieutenant she once knew – a lieutenant she murdered in cold blood.
Ancillary Mercy	Ann Leckie	While searching Athoek Station’s slums, Fleet Captain Breq finds someone who appears to be an ancillary from a ship that has been hiding beyond the Radch’s reach for three thousand years.
Provenance	Ann Leckie	An ambitious young woman has just one chance to secure her future and reclaim her family’s priceless lost artifacts
Translation State	Ann Leckie	The mystery of a missing translator sets three lives on a collision course that will have a ripple effect across the stars
A Memory Called Empire	Arkady Martine	The story follows Mahit Dzmare, the ambassador from Lsel Station to the Teixcalaanli Empire, as she investigates the death of her predecessor and the instabilities that underpin that society.
A Desolation Called Peace	Arkady Martine	A few months after A Memory Called Empire, alien forces massacre an industrial colony of the Teixcalaanli Empire. The Teixcalaanli admiral Nine Hibiscus, tasked with confronting the threat, requests an Information Ministry specialist to attempt to communicate with the inscrutable enemy.
Doomsday Book	Connie Willis	The story is set in two epidemics in two time periods, an influenza epidemic in 2054 and the Black Death in 1348, and the two stories alternate, the future time worrying about Kivrin, the student trapped in the wrong part of the past, while Kivrin back in 1348 is trying to cope and learn and help.
To Say Nothing of the Dog	Connie Willis	The story of Ned Henry, a historian from Oxford University in the year 2057 who is part of a team attempting to reconstruct to the last detail the Coventry Cathedral as it was before its destruction during the WWII Nazi Blitz.
Blackout	Connie Willis	Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place, with scores of time-traveling historians being sent into the past. But now the time-travel lab is suddenly canceling assignments and switching around everyone’s schedules.
All Clear	Connie Willis	Traveling back in time, from Oxford circa 2060 into the thick of World War II, was a routine excursion for three British historians eager to study firsthand the heroism and horrors of the Dunkirk evacuation and the London Blitz. But getting marooned in war-torn 1940 England has turned them from temporal tourists into besieged citizens struggling to survive.
Hyperion	Dan Simmons	Seven pilgrims from different worlds are chosen for a mission to Hyperion. They must locate the Time Tombs. These structures continually move back in time and they are guarded by a dangerous figure called the Shrike. They must destroy the Shrike or manipulate the Time Tombs to preserve humanity.
The Fall of Hyperion	Dan Simmons	On the world of Hyperion, the mysterious Time Tombs are opening. And the secrets they contain mean that nothing—nothing anywhere in the universe—will ever be the same.
Endymion	Dan Simmons	A story of destiny and heroes. Aenea, the daughter of a cybrid and famous Hyperion pilgrim, travels 250 years into the future, to the year 3099 A.D., beginning her journey to become The One Who Teaches.
The Rise of Endymion	Dan Simmons	Set more than 275 years after the fall of the Hegemony of Man, an interstellar organization connected by farcaster portals. The Roman Catholic Church has formed the Pax, an administrative entity that formalizes the Church’s control and implements a theocracy.
Leviathan Wakes	James S.A. Corey	Two hundred years after migrating into space, mankind is in turmoil. When a reluctant ship’s captain and washed-up detective find themselves involved in the case of a missing girl, what they discover brings our solar system to the brink of civil war, and exposes the greatest conspiracy in human history.
Caliban’s War	James S.A. Corey	On Ganymede, breadbasket of the outer planets, a Martian marine watches as her platoon is slaughtered by a monstrous supersoldier. On Earth, a high-level politician struggles to prevent interplanetary war from reigniting. And on Venus, an alien protomolecule has overrun the planet, wreaking massive, mysterious changes and threatening to spread out into the solar system.
Abaddon’s Gate	James S.A. Corey	For generations, the solar system – Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt – was humanity’s great frontier. Until now. The alien artifact working through its program under the clouds of Venus has appeared in Uranus’s orbit, where it has built a massive gate that leads to a starless dark.
Cibola Burn	James S.A. Corey	Independent settlers stand against the overwhelming power of a corporate colony ship with only their determination, courage, and the skills learned in the long wars of home. Innocent scientists are slaughtered as they try to survey a new and alien world.
Nemesis Games	James S.A. Corey	A thousand worlds have opened, and the greatest land rush in human history has begun. As wave after wave of colonists leave, the power structures of the old solar system begin to buckle. As a new human order is struggling to be born in blood and fire, James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante must struggle to survive and get back to the only home they have left.
Babylon’s Ashes	James S.A. Corey	The Free Navy has crippled the Earth and begun a campaign of piracy and violence among the outer planets. The colony ships heading for the thousand new worlds on the far side of the alien ring gates are easy prey, and no single navy remains strong enough to protect them. James Holden and his crew know the strengths and weaknesses of this new force better than anyone.
Persepolis Rising	James S.A. Corey	In the thousand-sun network of humanity’s expansion, new colony worlds are struggling to find their way. Every new planet lives on a knife edge between collapse and wonder, and the crew of the aging gunship Rocinante have their hands more than full keeping the fragile peace.
Tiamat’s Wrath	James S.A. Corey	Thirteen hundred gates have opened to solar systems around the galaxy. But as humanity builds its interstellar empire in the alien ruins, the mysteries and threats grow deeper.
Leviathan Falls	James S.A. Corey	As nearly unimaginable forces prepare to annihilate all human life, Holden and a group of unlikely allies discover a last, desperate chance to unite all of humanity, with the promise of a vast galactic civilization free from wars, factions, lies, and secrets if they win.
Memory’s Legion	James S.A. Corey	A collection of short stories and novellas set in The Expanse universe.
The Three-Body Problem	Liu Cixin	Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth.
The Dark Forest	Liu Cixin	The UN forms the Planetary Defense Council (PDC) to coordinate defensive efforts against the impending assault of the Trisolarans, who have launched a massive invasion fleet that will reach Earth in around 400 years.
Death’s End	Liu Cixin	Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge.
All Systems Red	Martha Wells	All Systems Red follows the (mis)adventures of Murderbot as it tries to protect its humans, when those humans get in trouble after the sudden disappearance of another team on the other side of the planet.
Artificial Condition	Martha Wells	Murderbot returns to a site where it went rogue and killed a bunch of people, teams up with a research transport named ART, and falls in with a trio of researchers who are trying to negotiate a deal with their terrible employer.
Rogue Protocol	Martha Wells	The case against the too-big-to-fail GrayCris Corporation is floundering, and more importantly, authorities are beginning to ask more questions about where Dr. Mensah’s SecUnit is. And Murderbot would rather those questions went away. For good.
Exit Strategy	Martha Wells	Having traveled the width of the galaxy to unearth details of its own murderous transgressions, as well as those of the GrayCris Corporation, Murderbot is heading home to help Dr. Mensah—its former owner (protector? friend?)—submit evidence that could prevent GrayCris from destroying more colonists in its never-ending quest for profit. But who’s going to believe a SecUnit gone rogue? And what will become of it when it’s caught?
Network Effect	Martha Wells	When Murderbot’s human associates (not friends, never friends) are captured and another not-friend from its past requires urgent assistance, Murderbot must choose between inertia and drastic action. Drastic action it is, then.
Fugitive Telemetry	Martha Wells	When Murderbot discovers a dead body on Preservation Station, it knows it is going to have to assist station security to determine who the body is (was), how they were killed (that should be relatively straightforward, at least), and why (because apparently that matters to a lot of people—who knew?)
System Collapse	Martha Wells	Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can’t have the planet, they’re sure as hell not leaving without something.
The Fifth Season	N.K. Jemisin	The story follows the journey of Essun, mother and “orogene,” an oppressed, racially defined class of powerful earth-benders in Jemisin’s fictitious, supercontinental world, The Stillness.
The Obelisk Gate	N.K. Jemisin	The book continues forward from an especially bad Fifth Season, one that may become an apocalypse. It follows two main characters: a mother and daughter, both of whom are magically talented (“orogenes”), who were separated just before the most recent Fifth Season.
The Stone Sky	N.K. Jemisin	The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women.
Ninefox Gambit	Yoon Ha Lee	Ninefox Gambit centers on disgraced captain Kel Cheris, who must recapture the formidable Fortress of Scattered Needles in order to redeem herself in front of the Hexarchate. To win an impossible war Captain Kel Cheris must awaken an ancient weapon and a despised traitor general.
Raven Stratagem	Yoon Ha Lee	When the hexarchate’s gifted young captain Kel Cheris summoned the ghost of the long-dead General Shuos Jedao to help her put down a rebellion, she didn’t reckon on his breaking free of centuries of imprisonment - and possessing her.
Revenant Gun	Yoon Ha Lee	Shuos Jedao is awake… …and nothing is as he remembers. He’s a teenager, a cadet-a nobody-in the body of an old man; a general in command of an elite force. And he’s the most feared, and reviled, man in the galaxy.
Hexarchate Stories	Yoon Ha Lee	The essential short story collection set in the universe of Ninefox Gambit.

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